Friday, May 1, 2009

Guest Posting: Khalil Gibran, Local Boy Made Good

Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Phil Metres reflects on the life and times of Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, author of what's become the best-selling single volume of poetry in U.S. history. Of all the things Gibran was—a man, a legend, a local-boy-made-good, a salve for the spiritual homelessness of immigrant Arab Americans—he was also a guest at the Brooklyn Heights home of Metres's great- grandparents in 1927. Read on to find the full text of Gibran's thank-you letter to the Boulos family—and to discover the nation of prophets that The Prophet left in its wake.

The first thing you'll learn about Khalil Gibran from an Arab—particularly from a Lebanese immigrant in love with the Old Country—is that Khalil Gibran's name is not, in fact, Khalil Gibran. Nor is it, as my Knopf edition of The Prophet has it, “Kahlil Gibran.” Rather, he was born Gibrān Khalīl Gibrān bin Mikhā'īl bin Sa'ad. It might be typical for an immigrant to the New World to shed some of the flourishes of an Old World name, so the Ellis- Island-style reduction is not so surprising. However, the spelling of Gibran's first name still mystifies me; in Arabic, the sound that we transliterate as “kh” is, if I’m not mistaken, an aspirated “h” sound, so the displacement of the “h”—which appears not only on his books, but also on his letterhead—is but one of many mysteries of the boy from Bsharri.

In the New Yorker last year, Joan Acocella’s review “Prophet Motive” situated new biographies on the poet in the pop cultural sensation that Gibran became and continues to be:

"Shakespeare, we are told, is the best-selling poet of all time. Second is Lao-tzu. Third is Kahlil Gibran, who owes his place on that list to one book, 'The Prophet,' a collection of twenty-six prose poems, delivered as sermons by a fictional wise man in a faraway time and place. Since its publication, in 1923, 'The Prophet' has sold more than nine million copies in its American edition alone. There are public schools named for Gibran in Brooklyn and Yonkers. 'The Prophet' has been recited at countless weddings and funerals. It is quoted in books and articles on training art teachers, determining criminal responsibility, and enduring ectopic pregnancy, sleep disorders, and the news that your son is gay. Its words turn up in advertisements for marriage counselors, chiropractors, learning-disabilities specialists, and face cream."

Acocella’s slightly mocking tone toward Gibran’s New-Age success is fairly typical of the intellectual and literary set, of course. Poets are relentless in their derision of Gibran, placing him somewhere around Jewel and Jimmy Carter in their pantheon. (My college roommate, also of Lebanese descent, called The Prophet “a kind of New Testament for Schoolgirls.”)

But in my household growing up—and in my father's childhood home—Gibran was a revered name, not only because he was a Lebanese poet who wrote the ubiquitous The Prophet, but also because he hailed from the hometown of my father's mother: Bsharri, Lebanon. In fact, Gibran even came to stay at my family's home in Brooklyn Heights (290 Hicks Street) for a while. According to family legend, he even wrote some of his Prophet while there.

I can’t confirm that legend exactly—it seems the sort of mythic and delusionary grandeur that I love about my family. But I do have in my possession a letter that Gibran wrote to my great-grandmother thanking the family for their hospitality and generosity. Whatever else you want to say about Gibran, he was a local boy made good. And, in the process of blazing his trail from Bsharri, he gave Arab Americans and Arab American poets a figure of their own possible success in translating ineffable Bsharris into poetic Brooklyns.

Incidentally, Gibran's “masterpiece,” such as it is, turns not so much upon poetry as upon the genre of wisdom literature and its subgenre, the aphorism, which holds a particularly valued place in Arab culture. Like all good aphorists, he uses language that is both plain and metaphorical; it invites understanding yet in a way that brushes against the mysteries of being alive. There’s no doubt that the style occasionally ascends into comical elevations, and that its high tone seems lost in the ironies and specificities of American life. But that sort of spiritual homelessness pretty much describes a large swath of immigrant life. On houses, for example, the Prophet says:

Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.

It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye.

Speaking of houses, here—in a rough translation and pictured to the left below—is the letter Gibran sent to my great-grandmother, Nehia Boulos, thanking her for hosting him at 290 Hicks Street:

Kahlil Gibran51 West 10th St.New York City

April 22, 1927

To the Woman of My Country,

I salute you with a thousand salutes. I was very happy receiving your second letter, this is due to missing your first letter between my going to Boston and getting back to New York and could not find your address among my papers, and there are so many of them in this room.

I beg your pardon and forgiveness. You will know that every breeze from our Old Country breezes takes me back to that high mountain and that holy valley, you and your family and all that surround you are from these delightful breezes.

In every season I leave to Boston, leaving behind me all my works. This is because I prefer to be around people who were where I was born and they like I did and they are like me and sincere to this beautiful far country.

I beg you first to give best wishes to your kind husband and children (old and young) (God bless them), and second to mention my name with kindness to your dear parents, and to your relatives. They are, like you well are, related to me. The same blood that flows in their veins flows through mine too.

God bless you and protect you, from the sincere son of your country,

Khalil Gibran

The letter has the kind of poetic language which is typical not just of a poet, but of the Arabic language as well. But the letter's poetry is not explained by the Arabic language, though. In his dedication to my copy of The Prophet, given to me on my 20th birthday, my father writes, in English: “you are a prophet yourself and a distant cousin of Kahlil. If you could take in complete the pride and love other people have of you, you would be an even happier young man.”

In her review of Gibran's life, Acocella notes, “a later mentor declared him a mystic, 'a young prophet.' (This was before he had published anything professionally.) And so he began to see himself that way.” I, too, was baptized into the possibility of self-mythology. It was a gift, I see now, to have the sort of parents willing to see prophecy in a vexatious, self-conscious, over-serious and dreamy child. As Gibran would have it, via the Prophet’s own words: “Your children are not your children… You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.” Something like that.

6 comments:

This discussion really moved me, especially the author's father's dedication to his son. I think taking seriously the idea of a prophet means risking feeling silly and unintelligent. Somehow the irony comes with beauty--it doesn't matter if the prophet is real, it only matters that he generates belief (optimism) in himself and others. This author seems to understand and explain the strangeness of leaps of faith in a way that I appreciated. Thanks.

About Me

Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War

"Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

•

"Burma-Shave quatrains, newspaper columns, scrapbooks with thousands of stanzas held together by affection and paste, folksy, pseudonymous, nationally famous radio hosts and the fans who sent them an avalanche of homemade verse: these are just some of the materials taken seriously in Mike Chasar’s extraordinarily memorable, and likely influential, study of popular American verse, and of the popular culture that grew up around it, for most of the twentieth century. Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, to images, and to informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links Williams Carlos Williams’s innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the Hallmark card; he may change how you see some eminent writers’ work. Even more than that, however, Chasar should get twenty-first-century readers to sit up and notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry that they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode that Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/ HAS LOTS TO SAY/ IF YOU CAN READ IT/ CHASAR’S WAY. His book is an ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies; it’s also a surprise, and a delight." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

•

"As Bob Dylan put it, 'We have our ideas about poets,' and we certainly have our ideas about poetry. Lately, those ideas have led to a national outcry in favor of bringing poetry back into American public life. But in Everyday Reading, Mike Chasarshows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important—really, a necessary—book for anyone interested in modern poetics, in the history of reading, in the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance." — Virginia Jackson, University of California Irvine, author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

•

"This breakthrough study convincingly shows that American poetry in the opening decades of the twentieth century, far from being a largely elitist product that appealed to a limited audience, circulated among a number of different readers to a remarkable degree and left its traces in surprising areas." — Edward Brunner, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Cold War Poetry

•

"The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness—this is what Mike Chasar ... has shown in his book Everyday Reading" — Marina Zagidullina, New Literary Observer

•

"[T]he originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading." — Lisa Steinman, The Journal of American History

•

"[The] tension between the poetic and the popular is the crux of Chasar's fun and thoughtful book. Chasar is a literary archaeologist. He excavates the poetry in Burma Shave ads, literary scrapbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, old time radio shows, and yes, even Hallmark cards. His close reading of [Paul] Engle's poem 'Easter' as well as the reproduction of the actual card is genius. His thesis is that early-twentieth-century market culture was saturated with poetry (as opposed to 'Poetry') that was participatory rather than exclusionary. This emotional interactivity with poetry, Chasar posits, set the stage for the bizarre matrix of media, commerce, and culture that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century." — Dean Rader, American Literature

•

"Everyday Reading goes far in illustrating how poetry played a much larger role in most Americans' lives than it does today. Chasar paints a picture of a more various and ultimately dissident American public than most might have expected, a public for whom poetry was a crucial part of an overall strategy to counter the dominant political, economic, and social paradigms of their era. Written beautifully and researched meticulously, Everyday Reading will prove an important resource for political and cultural historians, literary scholars, and anyone else interested in how poetry transcends the page and becomes an active part of how we spend our days." — Daniel Kane, Journal of American Studies

•

"Highly recommended." — Choice

•

"Everyday Reading is sure to act as a touchstone for scholars interested in popular digital literature as well as the contemporary avant-garde....[It] concludes with a flourish: an anecdote about the author's grandmother's use of clipped poetry in wartime letters to her husband that evidences Chasar's arguments while remaining personal and poignant. It is a fitting moment for a book that is so innovative, important, and constantly successful" — David Levine, CollegeLiterature

•

"Scrapbooking, which appears in other chapters following the first one, becomes the controlling metaphor for Chasar's study—and for reading habits today. With so many cultural products driven by individual tastes and various engines of a global economy, readers inevitably select and construct their own 'tradition,' which may have much or little to do with what they have been taught is important. Chasar's well-documented, thoughtful book offers the larger picture of this phenomenon, of which the battle for the best is only part of the story." — Rhonda Pettit, Reception

•

"A brilliantly written book, startling the reader with his thorough research and analysis" — Sheila Erwin, Portland Book Review

Now Available from the University of Iowa Press

"[Poetry after Cultural Studies] should become an important part of debates about what poets do, what their poems are good for." — Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry